I was on the sofa with a visionary

There was an article in The Daily Telegraph that I read on the plane yesterday. It’s titled “The happiest marriages start on the internet” and it’s about a large-scale survey that appears to show that couples who met on the web have a substantially lower rate of divorce and report higher levels of satisfaction. The article says that survey did not investigate why online marriages are more successful. But I know why.

A great many years ago, I took part in a programme about internet dating on a Sky channel. It was so long ago that I can’t remember when it was (late 1990s I would guess) or what the programme was called or even what channel it was on. Anyway, the idea of the show was they that would have a relationship expert and a technical expert on the sofa with a number of couples who had met through the then-new channel of internet dating. Since they couldn’t find a technical expert, they called me and, since I will do literally anything to get the company name on screen, I went along.

It was really fun. They asked me a few questions about internet security and how you could be sure whether the person you were talking to was who they say they are. I told them, essentially, you can’t. On the internet, no-one knows you’re a dogbot, and so on. But what I do remember is that the female relationship expert, who I think was a psychologist, said unequivocally that in the long run it would be internet dating that is the norm and that the idea that you would choose a mate while drunk in a bar would be considered ridiculous. I may be remembering incorrectly, but I think she made two main points about this.

The first was that internet dating enabled people to get to know each other a lot better before they met, so they could make much more accurate long-term selections.

The second was that women would benefit from this mode of dating because it enabled them to evaluate multiple men simultaneously and thus greatly improve their odds of selecting an appropriate mate. Women are pickier than men, so the online mode is very helpful to them.

The expert also absolutely predicted that in a few years time, internet couples would have a better success rate than non-internet couples, a prediction that appears borne out by the statistics I saw in yesterday’s paper.